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Poor design on the websight [Trollville]

Posted on: January 17, 2008 - 11:13pm

evilsatan

Posts: 34

Joined: 2007-02-09

Offline

Poor design on the websight [Trollville]

This site's look leaves much to be desired. It's straight out of 1998. I can't bring myself to visit this site very often because the design is so poor. I mean, come on, I've seen Creation Science web sites with better design quality. Surely one of you guys can bring this thing into the 21st century.

Instead of just offering useless criticisms why don't you offer suggestions? The crew that runs this site runs it to the best of their ability on limited funds.

Seeing as how your first post is of the nit-picky nature, I'm not sure why you think someone would even care about your opinion. Of course, that is just my opinion and I certainly don't represent the majority of folks on this forum, much less those that developed it.

Well, you'll note i put this in Trollville and saved you the trouble of moderating the comment here.

I don't think my distaste for the design of the site is nit-picky. I think a professional looking web site design lends credibility to the authors and subject matter being discussed. While there is certainly a lot of worthwhile content, the presentation of it makes it seem like it comes from an untrustworthy source.

I'm not moderating in the least. I was only giving my opinion of your post. You're more than entitled to it as I am of mine. Sapient has already stated in other threads that they are in midst of overhauling the site.

I agree that the website could use some work. (I think the design isn't too much of a problem. My main complaint is that the website could be much quicker loading.) Do you have any specific suggestions? If so, I'm sure the website team would love to hear them. Vague "improve" or "make it professional" statements aren't really helpful though because it doesn't say what you would consider an improvement or professional.

<rant>

As for Drupal, I have put together an assassination plan (joke). They need to learn how to create a user-friendly templating system. Currently it's a mish-mash of HTML and PHP code and much of it consists of variables where HTML code is inside the variables and you cannot find where in the world the variable originates to alter the HTML code. Sometimes if you try to delete useless CSS files (0 bytes in size) the entire website will break! I don't know if I could create a more convoluted piece of crap if I tried.

function template_bit(variables) {return <<<EOF__HTML_CODE_HEREEOF;}

Call the template_bit when needed. Is that so difficult, Drupal developers? Is it?

And the available Drupal themes for the most part suck—not because of their design but stupid code decisions. For example, some themes set margins between the browser window and the boxes on the left side of the webpage using font-points or em-spacing. Why in the world are font-points or the length of em-dashes being used to set margins? Do they fear that if the user selects in their browser to receive large fonts that the humongous paragraphs will be unreadable if there aren't humongous margins to push them away from the browser window?

Then, of course, they mix content and presentation by using CSS inside the HTML code instead of moving it to a separate file—if you change a portion of the CSS file and don't see a rendering change, you go back to the CSS file wondering what went wrong in your edit only to realize, thirty minutes later, that the imbecile was over-riding your CSS by the CSS he or she placed in the HTML code where it doesn't belong. The people who create Drupal themes generally make no sense.

Some web developers and designers make me want to rush into their mother's basement, beat the hell out of them, then punch their mother for complaining about it.

And to answer a previous comment about using em dash and pt quantities, it's an accessibility issue. pt and em sizes are relative sizes and px is a fixed size. For maximum accessibility you aren't supposed to use fixed sizes, but with the lousy browser support of standards, I personally have a hard time getting away from using fixed sizes.

As for em and pt sizing, I realize those are used for text to improve accessibility for those with vision impairments. My complaint concerned the use of them for setting the size of margins. Why a text block on the left would need to be spaced from the browser window by 2em (two of these — relative to the chosen font size), for example, is beyond my ability to fathom.

Yeah there are tons of problems on the site. The best way to help is to give specific suggestions. Over the last few months we've been working on handling the objections raised by the "your site suxorz" crowd, and we've spent a bunch of time talking to other site admins. It turns out that every single website admin we've talked to that owns other atheist sites all hear the same stuff "your site sucks" followed by a lack of constructive criticism. Do people realize "teh site dezin suxorz" doesn't help us at all?

Thanks for the follow up advice on the block coloration. I agree with that one. That issue has been addressed in the new version of our site, which right now is mostly a white background, a very very light blue background on posts, and black text. This is a simplistic design we've implemented due to a few people raising the objection you raised. Hopefully you will be around to witness everyone who gets pissed at us because our site is simplistic and lighter in color next month so you can see firsthand that it is a complete impossibility to make 15,000 people happy with everything on our site.

Wow, direct from the horse's mouth. Where else do you get service like that? The new design sounds like it's going to be a winner to me. And I'll keep my eye out for any more problems that I might see and will offer specifics if possible. Maybe you could add a section to the forums just for XHTML nazis like myself to moan and bitch about site mechanics.

Yeah, Drupal is a hot mess, but designing a high traffic site might look good on a resume.

If anyone ever finds a company in which creation of the largest atheist website in the world would be good on a resume please let me know. Even our chemical engineer and microbiologist partner has problems with theistic human personel directors. I've always wondered how I would explain these years if I ever had to work in the real world again.

Yeah there are tons of problems on the site. The best way to help is to give specific suggestions.

I once wrote:

I don't really care about the color scheme, the layout is what troubles me.

The site is packed with to much information on the first page, this makes it hard to get around and it makes each page longer than they should to reload. I had to search for 5 minutes to find where my PM box was. So I suggest a more simple and "to the point" main page.

You didn't like my suggestions so...

Can I bitch now ?

Si Dieu existe, c'est Son problème !If God exists, it's His problem !--Graffiti on the walls of the Sorbonne (France), May 1968romancedlife.blogspot.com

I did this too, initially - but now checking out the little number next to my inbox is second nature. In fact I can see it as I'm typing this response now. Also, GDIO, don't you get an e-mail when you have a PM which includes the link? If not, you can edit this under "My Account."

I did this too, initially - but now checking out the little number next to my inbox is second nature. In fact I can see it as I'm typing this response now. Also, GDIO, don't you get an e-mail when you have a PM which includes the link? If not, you can edit this under "My Account."

My problem is not that I can't use a computer (I'm not a smart girl... But I'm not that stupid lol)

I know where the PM box is now, that's not a problem.

The problem I have with the RRS website is that it's not as intuitive as it could be which makes it hard for new people to get around the site... But of course, even without using calculus of general relativity mathematics, we can still figure it out and manage to get around....

Si Dieu existe, c'est Son problème !If God exists, it's His problem !--Graffiti on the walls of the Sorbonne (France), May 1968romancedlife.blogspot.com

I did this too, initially - but now checking out the little number next to my inbox is second nature. In fact I can see it as I'm typing this response now. Also, GDIO, don't you get an e-mail when you have a PM which includes the link? If not, you can edit this under "My Account."

My problem is not that I can't use a computer (I'm not a smart girl... But I'm not that stupid lol)

I know where the PM box is now, that's not a problem.

The problem I have with the RRS website is that it's not as intuitive as it could be which makes it hard for new people to get around the site... But of course, even without using calculus of general relativity mathematics, we can still figure it out and manage to get around....

Girl dancing in orbit, as screwed up as this sounds... if it takes someone 5 minutes of clicking around in order to find a function or feature of the site, this is actually a benefit to the site. We are ranked and are paid by advertisers based on pageviews and length of visits, our "sponsors" are reliant on page views. With that said due to the nature of what we do here, I don't mind that we ocassionaly lose someone that isn't willing to take some time to figure out how our site works. If someone is willing to spend some time to figure out how the site works, that lends a little credence to their desire to become a productive member of the community here. And yes, I understand the obverse to this argument, and I see the validity of the other side of this. The site wasn't purposefully created to make it hard to navigate, it was created with the opposite intent... just saying.

FWIW: I happen to think the site is a complete breeze to navigate and Kelly told me that before she lived with me full time and she went to this site for the first time she felt it was perfectly easy to find everything.

Girl dancing in orbit, as screwed up as this sounds... if it takes someone 5 minutes of clicking around in order to find a function or feature of the site, this is actually a benefit to the site. We are ranked and are paid by advertisers based on pageviews and length of visits, our "sponsors" are reliant on page views. With that said due to the nature of what we do here, I don't mind that we ocassionaly lose someone that isn't willing to take some time to figure out how our site works. If someone is willing to spend some time to figure out how the site works, that lends a little credence to their desire to become a productive member of the community here. And yes, I understand the obverse to this argument, and I see the validity of the other side of this. The site wasn't purposefully created to make it hard to navigate, it was created with the opposite intent... just saying.

FWIW: I happen to think the site is a complete breeze to navigate and Kelly told me that before she lived with me full time and she went to this site for the first time she felt it was perfectly easy to find everything.

I get your point.

And as I said ! You don't agree with me and you don't like my suggestions. It's your site, it's ok.

I'll get over it, dont' worry.

But in the meantime. Let me bitch ! It's good for my blood pressure and when my blood pressure is low I get this fuzzy feeling inside that makes me want sing the whole repertoire of The sound of music. Don't deny me this pleasure please !

Si Dieu existe, c'est Son problème !If God exists, it's His problem !--Graffiti on the walls of the Sorbonne (France), May 1968romancedlife.blogspot.com

The website has flaws but works fine and gets the job done. I think the OP is just a techno-snot that feels the need to boost his own techno-ego by tactlessly coming in here on his opening post to rag the site.

Guys like this are one of the reasons I'm f'n sick of the technology bidness...some over zealous shithead always thinks their way is better. It almost reminds me of religious zeal.

The website has flaws but works fine and gets the job done. I think the OP is just a techno-snot that feels the need to boost his own techno-ego by tactlessly coming in here on his opening post to rag the site.

Guys like this are one of the reasons I'm f'n sick of the technology bidness...some over zealous shithead always thinks their way is better. It almost reminds me of religious zeal.

That's what the internet's all about buddy. People coming in and making honest, yet anonymous comments in a consequence free environment. It's good to blow off steam sometimes.

The website has flaws but works fine and gets the job done. I think the OP is just a techno-snot that feels the need to boost his own techno-ego by tactlessly coming in here on his opening post to rag the site.

Guys like this are one of the reasons I'm f'n sick of the technology bidness...some over zealous shithead always thinks their way is better. It almost reminds me of religious zeal.

That's what the internet's all about buddy. People coming in and making honest, yet anonymous comments in a consequence free environment. It's good to blow off steam sometimes.

It's also rude. At least you stuck it in trollville though.

BTW, my wife thinks you are my doppelganger (and says I'm a hypocrite because I used to make techno-snot comments all the time a few years ago).

You mean like gigantic scrolling and flashing text: "click once" next to the post button?

Nah, something more along the lines of a spam filter that prevents you from posting more than once within 30 seconds. That way if I accidently hit the button twice it won't post my topic twice. It would post it, then reject the second click because it was too quick after the first one.

And as I said ! You don't agree with me and you don't like my suggestions. It's your site, it's ok.

I'll get over it, dont' worry.

But in the meantime. Let me bitch ! It's good for my blood pressure and when my blood pressure is low I get this fuzzy feeling inside that makes me want sing the whole repertoire of The sound of music. Don't deny me this pleasure please !

Actually I like all suggestions that come across in a constructive manner. I believe you are legitimately trying to be constructive. With that said, I also have a high level of confidence in my approach, and recognize that some advice may be based on your view of our site as you see it, where as I have an additional subset of knowledge on the issue. By all means, everyone who has legitimate constructive criticism, please keep it up. With that said if the thread develops enough I think you will find that it is impossible to make everyone completely content with the design of our site seeing as how there are so many different personality types and preferences suggested by the community.

You mean like gigantic scrolling and flashing text: "click once" next to the post button?

Nah, something more along the lines of a spam filter that prevents you from posting more than once within 30 seconds. That way if I accidently hit the button twice it won't post my topic twice. It would post it, then reject the second click because it was too quick after the first one.

Agreed. To be honest, I thought I already had one in. We'll get that added to the list. Want to see the list? I haven't shown it to anyone in public. Here are some thoughts and lined up site enhancements (next step is to set a schedule for their implementation).......

This module provides a site map that gives visitors an overview of your site. It can also display the RSS feeds for all blogs and categories. Drupal generates the RSS feeds automatically that few seem to be aware that they exist.

The site map can display the following items:

A message to be displayed above the site map * The latest blogs. * Any books that optionally will be displayed fully expanded. * Any menus that will be displayed fully expanded. * Any categories, i.e vocabulary, with all the terms expanded. Optionally with node counts and RSS feeds. * A syndication block, the "more" link goes to the site map.

The Frequently Asked Questions (faq) module allows users with the 'administer faq' permission to create question and answer pairs which they want displayed on the 'faq' page. The 'faq' page is automatically generated from the FAQ nodes configured. There are a number of features available in the 5.x and 6.x branches which are not available in 4.7.x. The 4.7.x branch is now only receiving bug fixes. All new features will be done for Drupal 5.x and 6.x.

This module logs the modifications of nodes and comments done by non-authors (that is, anyone with the "administer content" or "administer comments" privileges) and displays the statistics on these modifications in a block as well as a detailed view of the modifications on separate pages.

This is a simple filter module which wraps input by breaking long words and preventing them from damaging your layout. This is a common problem on site with newbie or troll commenters who post long urls, or nonsense words to destroy the site layout. You cannot generally wrap a single word with css or table layouts.This filter will add a line break into words at a certain length and will not break html like long urls in a tags.

Planet is an aggregator that allows you to aggregate the blogs for users in a given role (e.g. staff) and associate content with the users rather than as a detached feed. This provides the benefit of showing avatars with content, providing per-user aggregation of planet content in addition to blog content, etc.

To use planet, go to admin/settings/planet and note the following sections:

Recent Items. This is a queue of items that have recently been pulled into the site. The convert column allows you to turn them into bona fide blog posts. This is useful if you want to feature blog posts front and center and keep planet as a secondary content view. Conversion allows you to float site-relevant content to the mainstream while providing a view of more general content from your members.

General Settings. The auto-publish value is a string that the module looks for in categories (if possible) or within a post itself. Posts that include the value will be auto-converted into blog entries. The role to select bloggers from lets you narrow the user list for when you're adding a feed and associating it with a user. A common setting will be to create a staff role and use this for planet.

Feeds. This section lets you add a new feed. Give it a title, select an author, provide the feed url, and you're off. You'll have to manually refresh it or wait for a cron run for items to be imported.

Feeds. This section lists current feeds, when they were last updated, how many items they have, and it allows you to edit, refresh, or freeze them. Freezing is a quick way to temporarily suspend updates from the given feed.

The Shoutbox module provides a block where visitors can quickly post short messages. Permissions can be set so that posts go live immediately or go to a moderation queue. A cron option allows the administrator to have old shouts deleted. The shoutbox has been updated for Drupal 5.x.

Provides a block displaying titles of nodes (related to a particular taxonomy term) in a scrolling news ticker. The "ticking" code integrates well in Drupal xhtml code (which means that it doesn't break w3c validation). In particular, the code does not rely on "document.write()". This work was sponsored by Koumbit.org. It's possible to configure the scrolling type (vertical, horizontal) and display speed (extra slow to extra fast).

DESCRIPTION/FEATURES -------------------- * Enables the ability to mass delete aging node revisions. Possible settings include node type, the age of node revision before being deleted, along with a cron frequency setting. The revisions may be deleted after review on an administer page as well. This module will NEVER delete the current revision of a node.

·Automate the process of deleting old revisions with the cron functionality.

This module enables chat rooms to be set up on Drupal sites. No additional software is required. Chat Room uses AJAX to update chats without page reloads. Chat rooms are nodes that provide access to chats and chat archives. This module does not support pop-up windows or invitations.

This module adds a new graphical control panel page. It allows the user to specify the menu path to use as the source for the Control Panel. ''admin' is the default. It also allows the user to specify if the want the Control Panel module to recursively build sub panels for the main Control Panel. The 4.7 version supports collapsable sub panels. (collapsable panels within panels) The 4.7 version also has the ability to generate the Control Panel via a block(s). This makes it particularly usefull with the new block regions capability available in 4.7. Also, theme's can override the icons used by the Control Panel by creating a 'controlpanel' directory in the theme base directory and placing their theme specific icons in this new directory.

A full-featured media management system for drupal. This makes it so you can easily manage your photos and videos with drupal. Acidfree albums and media items are drupal nodes to integrate better into your system. It offers themeable drawing routines for albums and each media type so it can fit in better with the rest of your website. Items can be added individually (the drupal node-centric method) and also via a mass-import page that allows server-side directories of media to be imported or zipped, bzipped or gzipped archives to be uploaded and imported.

This is useful on a news or membership site where teasers are available to the general public but the full body is only available to privileged users. Premium nodes appear in listings with full title and teaser available to anyone. If a user does not have adequate privileges, the body is replaced with an administrator-defined message (for example, an invitation to join the site).

Premium features time settings, so premium status can end (protecting latest content), or begin (protecting archived content) after an admin-defined timeframe.

Because this module does not use the node access system, it does not hide items that are unavailable to a user and is more efficient for large sites. Premium Content can be used in conjunction with any node access module to provide advanced access control.

This module allows site owners to issue affiliate links to their partners. When anonymous users follow these links, the clicks are counted by affiliate, day, and optional keyword. When referred users sign up for an account, the account is associated with that affiliate.

Reporting is currently limited to showing total clicks, signups, and sales (via the E-Commerce package) to referred users, and a list of all users referred by each Affiliate. The module is designed to allow more detailed reporting to be added.

Blogger module used for: 1. Display list of bloggers. You can limit how many bloggers displayed. 2. Display number of written blogs or not, i.e: Samuel (5), Linda (4), etc. 3. A "read more link" to show all bloggers with pagination support and their latest blog. 4. You can choose selected case formats: Upper, Small, or Wordcase. 5. Order by: none (random), name or blogs count. 6. Support Avatar on block and page. 7. You can set avatar size: original, width x height, keep aspect ratio.

Blogger has tested on this environment: - PHP version 4.4.4 - MySQL version 4.1.22-standard

Instead of showing a standard "404 Page not found", this module performs a search on the keywords in the URL, e.g. if a user goes to http://example.com/does/not/exist, this module will do a search for "does not exist".

This module allows you to play book pages as S5 presentations. S5 is Eric Meyer's Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System, which is based on the Opera Show format. S5 presentations work in a multitude of browsers, and also compatible with Opera Show.

VotingAPI helps developers who want to use a standardized API and schema for storing, retrieving, and tabulating votes for Drupal content. Among other things, it supports:

Rating of any content (comments, nodes, users, fish, whatever) Multi-criteria voting (rate a game based on video, audio, and replayability) Automatic tabulation of results (with support for different voting styles, like 'percentage' and '+1/-1&#39 Efficient caching of results (sorting and filtering doesn't require any recalculation) Hooks for additional vote calculations

Note that this module does NOT directly expose any voting mechanisms to end users. It's a framework designed to make life easier for other developers, and to standardize voting data for consumption by other modules (like Views).

Planet is an aggregator that allows you to aggregate the blogs for users in a given role (e.g. staff) and associate content with the users rather than as a detached feed. This provides the benefit of showing avatars with content, providing per-user aggregation of planet content in addition to blog content, etc.

MySite pages let users create a personalized summary of the site. The MySite module duplicates the functionality of tools like MyYahoo! and Google's personalized homepage.

The module allows registered site users to create a MySite page that contains content from throughout the site. For sites that use the Aggregator module, users may also add feeds from external web sites to their MySite pages.

In 5.x.2 versions, users with JavaScript can drag, drop and sort content on their custom personal layout. The 5.x.2 series also supports Blocks, Views and 'Droplets' -- content widgets created by the site administrator.

This module adds SMS (Short Message Service) texting capabilities to Drupal allowing the sending of messages to and the reception of messages from mobile phones. In itself it provides no user-interface to send or receive messages, just adds functions that can be called to allow other module to send messages and a hook method that allows modules to be informed of received messages.

It's not necessarily rude to criticize someone's website. The line should be drawn between venting frustration and spitefulness—there's nothing wrong with venting if you're not purposely trying to hurt someone. Ideally, criticisms should be specific so the developers have an idea of what you would consider an improvement. Those criticisms help websites so they should be encouraged. In my opinion, developers who shun constructive criticism aren't worthy of the title they claim for themselves.

If there's something about the website bothering you, please post your complaint here. If your complaint is about cosmetics, you should probably hold off on that though because the site is getting a different color scheme and such. If you have suggestions on how to improve the site structure (i.e. how it's navigated), for example, fire away.